Chapter Ninety-Four: Aftermath

He followed the map that had suddenly risen in his memory and made his way from the Abyssal City into the Kingdom of Yu.

It carried him along the southern bank below the Liang River, upstream by river traffic toward Yangshuo.

Yangshuo was famous in the Kingdom of Yu, especially the old site of the former Chang County.

Chang County had once vanished overnight, and not long after its disappearance, a city descended from the heavens and appeared upon its former grounds. The people of Yu named that city Nether Brilliance.

The name came from the phrase meaning the dimming of darkness.

Nether means night; Brilliance means day.

So Nether Brilliance signified the borderland where night and day met.

For the mortals of Yu, this was also an acknowledgment of the city’s strangeness.

After the destruction of the original extramural realm, Nether Brilliance became a new city that had fallen upon the old site of Chang County.

The ruined extramural realm, the ruined palaces within it, were now nothing more than broken walls and collapsed stones offering shelter to those who lived amid them.

Yet among those ruins survived a people.

They stood between day and night, between life and death.

They were the surviving descendants of the ancient Kingdom of Yue.

Bound by a peculiar spell, they could not leave Nether Brilliance, and nothing from the outside world could affect Nether Brilliance in return.

It stood apart from the world.

Yuan Yi stepped into Nether Brilliance.

Lantern light was striking in the darkness. The tall city walls effectively kept out the demons and monsters lurking in the night, while the smoky bustle of the city blazed like a brilliant fireball, daring the spirits clinging to the clouds of vapor to approach.

In the two years since Nether Brilliance came into being, there were always people who stumbled in by mistake, mortals and Qi cultivators alike.

But without exception, none of them ever managed to leave again.

By day, yang energy was dense and monsters retreated; by night, yin energy bred, and demons and fiends danced in wild disorder.

Yuan Yi staggered along the river.

This was a great river known as the Dark Water.

The Dark Water wound outside Jianliang City from west to east, flowing around the walls, the mountains, and the peaks. Wherever the river passed, it left fertile land for a thousand li, yet there were few crops here.

The water lay hushed; the mountains were perilous. This landscape of dragons coiling and tigers crouching held boundless power, answering and mingling with itself, as though it formed a vast array.

The former extramural realm had long since been turned to scorched earth by the battle involving Bai Zhaoju and the other Qi cultivators. Now, after two swift years, tenacious weeds had regained their life, and within the thick grass were prey holding their breath, hunters gathering force, and monsters watching Yuan Yi with sharp, greedy eyes.

But none of them dared approach the Dark Water.

Monsters traveled on the wind and dwelled in mist; if they neared the river and the miasma sank down into the water, they would be swallowed by the aquatic demons below.

Within Nether Brilliance there were rules, a law of the jungle. This was a world entirely unlike the one outside.

Yuan Yi felt no fear at all. He examined everything around him with care.

Not long afterward, he followed the river upstream and arrived before a market town.

Outside Jianliang City there were many such exchange markets, often nothing more than ruined walls and fallen houses, the broken remains of some palace or another.

At this market stood a watchtower ten zhang high. Inside it were guards armed with crossbows, dressed in strange attire, their weapons aimed beyond the market.

Aside from the guards, at the very top of the tower burned a cluster of torches that blazed without ever going out.

This market was called Qingnan Market. Before the towering stockade, patrols moved to and fro with fierce and savage looks. They were Qi cultivators transformed into human form by various divine beasts and sacred birds, exhaling spiritual radiance and radiating formidable presence as they watched every cultivator entering and leaving Nether Brilliance.

At the market’s entrance stood a stone stele taller than Yuan Yi by more than a head. Strange patterns were carved upon it. In its center was embedded the head of a stone-carved gluttonous beast. Yuan Yi took out a few taels of gold ingots from his robe, placed them in the beast’s mouth, then grasped the nose ring and struck the hidden signal.

The next moment, the gate of the market opened, and Yuan Yi walked inside.

Centered on that ten-zhang watchtower, Qingnan Market stretched outward in four broad avenues, dividing the entire market into four districts, each with its own entrance.

Yuan Yi entered from the southern gate and took South Gate Street. Branch roads crisscrossed in a neat parallel layout, narrowing from the outer edge toward the center.

Within the market, houses and shops rose one after another. Among the plain wooden and stone buildings moved not only the people of the ancient Kingdom of Yue, but also some Yu mortals who had lost their way here and could not leave, as well as Qi cultivators from the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths. There were even cultivators who had come here to take refuge after stirring up trouble elsewhere.

Where there are people, there is the martial world; where there is the martial world, there are conflicts. Everything that can happen in the cultivation world could happen here as well, only more cruelly.

Thus in Nether Brilliance there were no friends and no enemies; profit was the only scale by which good and evil were weighed.

All under heaven throng for gain; all under heaven travel for gain. Only the word profit can be pursued, and it can make a person cast aside self, family, and shame.

Yet these outsiders all knew this was the territory of the people of the ancient Kingdom of Yue.

So they would not normally provoke them, much less strike at them, because the moment they did, they would be erased by the special laws of Nether Brilliance.

The difference between them and the people of the ancient Kingdom of Yue was easy to see.

On the forehead of every person of the ancient Kingdom of Yue was a tiny slit, within which hid an eyeball; they had grown a third eye.

This third eye was linked to the laws governing Nether Brilliance and could judge whether any cultivator had acted against them, then call upon those laws to erase the malicious.

Qingnan Market was lively beyond measure at night. The four main streets shone with lantern light, the sea of people endless, shoulder brushing shoulder, a scene of great bustle.

As Yuan Yi walked through Qingnan Market, he suddenly felt a stirring in his heart. He lifted his gaze slightly and saw a bright moon hanging in the sky like a jade disc.

The dark side of the jade disc was the moon, the bright side the sun.

As he looked up, that disc twisted and changed in his eyes without cease, finally transforming into a heart pounding with life.

The heart was covered in human-skin masks, sewn on with dense and meticulous stitches.

With each beat of the heart, Yuan Yi’s own hollow heart throbbed once as well.

Then, within that immense heart, Wei Yan’s heart suddenly manifested.

Wei Yan looked at Yuan Yi, and Yuan Yi looked back at him.

Their gazes met and merged, as though transcending the limits of time and space.

In the next instant, Yuan Yi stood inside that heart.

"So I have already died," Wei Yan said, looking at Yuan Yi. "Back then, when Ji Longdu entered the Thunder Ancestor’s palace, he told me I would become the Thunder Ancestor’s food, and that he could help me."

Wei Yan shook his head and sighed. "At the time, I did not believe that the foolish and dim-witted Thunder Ancestor could become so clever, so I entrusted only my heart to him."

"But I never imagined that, in the end, it would not be my true body that came here to retrieve the heart, but you—my creation—who would arrive instead!"

Yuan Yi looked toward Nether Brilliance.

Wei Yan smiled and said, "I promised him that even if he failed, I would help him guard this piece of land, neither too large nor too small. And in order to preserve the imprint upon the heart, I sealed myself away."

After that, another consciousness was born within the heart, transforming it into a monster that devoured every Qi cultivator who entered Jianliang City.

"When Ji Longdu opened the heavens once more, I sensed that the contract I had signed with him had begun to take effect, so I brought Jianliang back to the Kingdom of Yue. And then I began waiting for the one who would come to harvest me."

"And now, I have waited for you." Wei Yan smiled.

At that very moment, the dense stitches on the great heart began to loosen, and the many human-skin masks began to fall to the ground.

The heart revealed its original form.

"Come," Wei Yan said. "Take this heart, and become me!"

For a moment, Yuan Yi hesitated. He did not know whether he should take the heart.

He could feel the vast power contained within it; once he absorbed it, he would instantly reach the Inner Realm, and even glimpse the realm of the Innate Gods.

"I choose to refuse!"

"He refused?" Xu Zhong said in astonishment.

At the next instant, by all rights he should not have refused.

In a sense, Yuan Yi was Wei Yan.

By taking Wei Yan’s heart, he would also be taking part of Wei Yan’s cultivation.

Yet Yuan Yi simply gave it up.

Xu Zhong was about to keep watching, wanting to hear Yuan Yi’s reason, when the yin-yang fish scattered apart at that moment.

The clear pool, mirror-bright, changed back into a pool of water once more.

Within the pool, aside from the red carp and the dragon-phoenix brocade carp, there was nothing else.

The two fish swam lazily through the water, softly releasing one bubble after another.

"What a pity!" Xu Zhong shook his head.

Then he looked at the scarecrow on the altar.

He repeated the same procedure, taking three drops of heart’s blood to form three incense sticks, and ignited them with the threefold harmony of essence, energy, and spirit.

Another soul fragment appeared on the scarecrow’s body.

Then Xu Zhong took down his bow and shot an arrow at the scarecrow.

Only after doing all this could he settle his mind and think.

Wei Yan had died, but not completely.

He had left behind Yuan Yi, this creation.

If Yuan Yi devoured his heart, he would become Wei Yan.

And the reason he had been able to do all this was because the Emperor of Longdu had taken his heart from its place of sealing.

"It seems the Emperor of Longdu had already known he would fail," Xu Zhong thought. "And yet he still did it."

The image of Jianliang surfaced in his mind.

"He left Wei Yan a sliver of hope, and Wei Yan in turn forged a pure land for the descendants of the Emperor of Longdu."

"He accomplished everything he could, and gave it his utmost effort." Xu Zhong thought. "He opened the path for all beings, letting them see the truth. As the one who opened the road, he was the first cornerstone, leaving the road ahead to his successor."

This successor did not refer to an heir by throne or blood.

It referred more to a successor of the same creed.

That could be Jiang Xuanyi, Hu River Old Mother, Xu Zhong himself, or even the ordinary beings within the Kingdom of Yu.

He then thought of Nether Brilliance. There, it truly seemed to have cut off the intrusion of heaven’s law and the control of the Thunder Ancestor, achieving in the fullest sense a land apart from the world.

"Perhaps he left some clue there for resisting the Thunder Ancestor."

Every action he took could have been aimed at the Thunder Ancestor, and Nether Brilliance’s existence could hardly be so simple.

Xu Zhong wanted to make a trip to Nether Brilliance.

But then, in the next instant, he thought again: why go to Nether Brilliance?

After all, he was not the successor of the Emperor of Longdu.

"I must have been influenced," he thought.

Then he escaped from the Nail-Head Seven-Arrows Book.